Seoul, Korea - 2018/10/31: Today, KB Kookmin Bank (KB) announced its new digital transformation initiative, “The K Project,” to strengthen its digital finance capability, innovate non-face-to-face service channels and reinforce KB’s global banking platform. Deployed on IBM z14, The K Project strengthens KB’s recommitment to IBM Z for their core banking system, by building on a highly secure, powerful and reliable platform. 

“The Project K” will further enhance the quality of KB’s digital customer services and improve productivity of business operations that require constant changes and innovations such as marketing channels and global platforms. As part of the initiative, IBM Z’s world-class secure services will support KB’s plan to establish the infrastructure for adoption and convergence of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud and blockchain. 

Woo-Yeul Lee, Head of IT Group and CIO of KB Kookmin Bank, commented, "IBM Z is best suited to address the type of digital innovation that KB intends to pursue. It has the advantage of integrating advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cloud while meeting the most important requirements for the system such as security, performance and reliability for the bank's core business," and added "We will focus on driving digital transformation and improving customer service quality and market competitiveness based on IBM Z."

IBM Z’s future-forward secure cloud capabilities include Pervasive Encryption, where 100 percent of data associated with any application, cloud service or database can be encrypted with no impact to SLAs. This capability coupled with tamper-responsive key management designed to meet FIPS Level 4 standards, and unique IBM Secure Services Container technology that protects applications and data from external and insider attacks, are the basis for a secure cloud infrastructure, and why IBM itself runs the IBM Blockchain Platform and IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services on IBM Z. The IBM Z platform enables modern enterprise developers, with support for open source, cloud and blockchain technologies such as Linux, Java, Hyperledger, Kubernetes and up to 2M Docker Containers on one system, as well as supporting data scientists with Spark on Z for efficient machine learning applications that can be run in-place alongside the data, and ability to scale-up a single MongoDB instance to 17 TB in a single system without database sharding. 

IBM Z, which KB has chosen as the core system for its new digital innovation infrastructure, is a powerful and secure transaction system capable of running more than 12.5 billion encrypted transactions per day. The security, high-performance and massive scale of the IBM Z makes it the ideal platform for running the world's core systems for financial institutions around the world. IBM Z is used by 93 of the world’s top 100 banks, and supports 87 percent of all credit card transactions and 29 billion ATM transactions each year.

Sang-wook Han, director of IBM Korea Systems, said, "IBM Z offers the performance and reliability needed to process vast amounts of transaction data, underpinned by the protective cryptographic umbrella of the world’s most advanced encryption technology and key protection. In addition, it offers great price competitiveness as the most high-end system acknowledged in the industry.”  

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